Table Plan: My First Campaign Setting

Notice: I know this is a day late for a Table Plan, but today was a busy day, plus I was still tired from an awesome weekend at a LARP known as Dystopia Rising.

As a sort of Post-D&D Origins Month epilogue, I want to talk about my first campaign setting that I ran, the Kingdom of Roselia.  It wasn't as involved as the one I am making now, but it had many towns fleshed out.  Basically, much like how the Ultima Series had towns based on each Virtue, this setting has towns and such based on each class and race in the Player's Handbook.  Some of these, like: Beast's Pit, The Blue City, Sienna; are location names I use today.  Some, like Midenhall, I got from other games.  The world was a strangely shaped super-continent that looked like most of a "D" except with the bottom half of the straight line in "D" missing.

 At least my Midenhall is bigger.

The world was also my first attempt at trying to make a world in which magic, being as common as it is in D&D, is practically used.  Golems and animated horses doing labor and taxi services, Kikiesque delivery services, etc; all existed in the Kingdom of Roselia.  Roselians shared a pantheon of Gods that included such deities like the Grey Angel and the Golden One.  Roselians generally knew peace, except for some places that had raiding tribes of Goblinoids.  Generally life was good.

My campaign in this setting was mainly having the PCs be a police force mixed with a sort of archaeology expedition, leading to the discovery that a Half-dragon demigod known as Apsu was awakening in the Dragon Graveyard, a giant desert hidden behind a mountain range that was in an ever changing jungle.  While some of the quests the party faced included that, they also had one-offs like: a hostel that hid a Yuan-Ti temple to Merrshaulk, a walking tower/keep that the party ends up using, a political plot on a Japanesque island, etc.

Finally, they followed an evil organization that wished to use Apsu for their own purposes, which failed for them horribly, and the party successfully stopped the half-dragon from taking over everything.  The ending of the campaign was kind of rushed, I felt DM-Burnout coming on, that, and I made this world to surround this one adventure, once it was done the world felt kind of blah.  Some worlds are made for a one-shot adventure series, and some, like my current, can be used for many an adventure.

As my first campaign, I didn't know how to balance things, and sometimes the cohesion failed, and some monsters were made too easy (i.e. Dragons should be fucking scary).  I also let one player become a Lich.  This is the same guy that I kind of looked to, at times, as an older brother in a way, so I guess that was part of the reason I let it slide, that and it made a running gag for the ages.  However, this campaign set some of the mainstays of my games.  City and location names, a world of practical magic (and now that put the theme of the titual movie in my head), that hostel, and other things.  Later on, I did revisit this world, and did write up more about it like a floating castl.... okay okay, so this was Miyazaki on steroids.

Would I ever make a Director's Cut of this adventure, maybe.  Despite the simplicity, there were quite a few things I liked about this setting, so I would more than likely do a personal director's cut with a group one day.